October182009

October012009

18:27

“The blog format is responsible for a thousand tawdry tablogs: hideous half-breeds of tabloid and blog built around odeous content, cluttered site designs, and optimised for pageviews alone.

Tabloggers aren’t writing; they’re creating content — content
that hopes to satisfy self-inflicted quotas [and] boost traffic. Tabloggers
write from a sense of obligation; a feeling that their content must be
regular and — worst of all — useful.Yet tablogs publish the ugliest kind of useful information:
vacuous lists, tutorials, and recycled how-tos that try so hard to be
handy as to become meaningless, soulless, voiceless and occasionally
dangerous.

Add to this the machine gun calls to action in the form of me-too
social networks, overpriced affiliate promotions, and chocolate box ad
matrices, and what you have is a shit tip of information design.”

February162008

17:40

The original version of Fray, started by Derek Powazek in 1996, is still my all-time favorite creative web project.

From way before blogs existed up until 2003, it was an online collection of personal short stories, sorted into the categories Criminal, Hope, Work and Drugs, and told in hypertext in a way only possible on the internet.

The lack of a content management system or templates meant that each story's hand-crafted HTML gave it a different feel from any other, with a level of attention to detail you just don't see on the web anymore: Some stories are illustrated with animated GIFs, some are creatively split up into framesets,
each with short paragraphs optimized for online reading, powerful one-liners as "next page" links, and a question encouraging readers to send in their own stories at the end.